The last few posts have discussed how human beings are hardwired for pleasure and to engage with work and with others. While pleasure and engagement can easily be associated with feeling the height of joy and ecstasy, meaningful experience has also the dimension of depth. We all know that some of our most meaningful experiences come from pain, sadness, even despair, so long as we can work through them with the attitude that “some good can come out of this.” Dennis Prager, in Happiness is a Serious Problem, writes: “Happiness can be attained under virtually any circumstances provided you believe your life has meaning and purpose.” The philosopher Nietzsche wrote: “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” Perhaps some of you read Brent Poirier’s recent article in the Huffington Post: “Processing Personal Pain -- A Baha'i View.” I highly recommend it.
It seems to me that more people than ever seem to lack enduring purpose in their lives. Meaninglessness is the worst sort of hell. It comes, in part, from shrinking from exploring life’s important questions. Education must equip students with both the tools and the opportunity to wrestle together with the great questions. There is so much pain and misery in the world today that for schools and teachers not to help students address these questions borders on the criminal. But, with few exceptions, our education does not address these questions in any meaningful way.
But it is extremely important that it do so because, as I said, meaningfulness has the added benefit over both pleasure and engagement of providing reason and explanation for pain and suffering. Having a reason for suffering can educe the strength to get through it. People are better able to handle life’s tragedies if they feel there is a reason for them. Indeed, to keep engaged in important work under great duress, or to welcome some pain as inevitable to the process of growth, thereby turning it into a pleasure—“I like the way it hurts” as one friend described it to me—are two of the hallmarks of spiritual maturity.
There is growing scientific evidence that the healing antidote for the pale sickliness of soul that many feel is deep conversation. Deep conversation not small talk makes people happier. This may sound counterintuitive, but that is because we are taught that pleasure is happiness. Yet people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, partly because they seem better able to cope with life’s challenges. A March 17, 2010 New York
The happiest person in the study had twice as many substantive conversations, and only one-third of the amount of small talk as the unhappiest. Almost half of the conversations the happiest person had were substantive, while only 21.8 percent of the unhappiest person’s conversations were substantive. Small talk made up only 10 percent of the happiest person’s conversations, while it made up almost three times as much –- or 28.3 percent –- of the unhappiest person’s conversations.
Teaching and pedagogy should be consistent with these scientific findings and with higher human nature, so that nature is nurtured and not neutered. The greatest work that anyone can do is to become, through authentic engagement with something greater than oneself, someone greater than oneself. The fruit of this effort is self-actualization of our divine potential.
A perceptive Japanese author, Toshiko Toriyama, wrote in her wonderful book, Kenji’s School: Ideal Education for All: “As long as the divine potential of each individual remains unmanifested, the transformation of this earth into heaven, or in other words, the appearance of a world that has attained true prosperity, is impossible.”
I would love for readers to post comments relating personal experiences of meaning, or to share their thoughts about this topic.
No comments:
Post a Comment